Inclusion and Exclusion in the Construction of Place in Architecture

When dealing solely in what David Harvey has referred to as ‘absolute’ and ‘relative’ space, paying attention primarily to issues of ‘firmness’ and ‘economy’, it is easy to end up designing the same building in several different locations. As the logic of capitalism does not necessarily involve any conception of mental or social space, as Juhani Pallasmaa has it, “architecture has lost its contact with its own mytho-poetic ground, the originary acts and images of dwelling and constructing.”[1] Architectural space, emptied of mythos and poesis, understood only in terms of technis, becomes alienated and sterile to the human encounter.

One of the central victims of the technical homogenization of buildings that has persisted throughout the modern period has been that uniquely grounding quality of space that we call place. Place depends on difference. The preservation and construction of a sense of uniqueness and immediacy in the environment is one of the responsibilities of an architect operating in ‘relational’ space (Harvey’s third type of space, of mental, cultural, social, political dimensions). Norberg-Schultz went so far even as to define architecture as the ‘art of place’[2]. But although this engagement with place entails an attention to the historical condition of a territory, this is not at all to say that architects should be wary of change, of the new. The prescription that the architect must engage with how “life takes place”[3] in a given territory, should imply that the architecture must remain open to many different sorts of life that might take place. As the philosopher Albrecht Wellmer wrote in 1988, “the only choice we have is between different directions in which to progress, different directions for change.”[4] The new is compulsory. To not think so is to flirt with the possibility of exclusion. Recognizing that place is a constructed value, the architect must engage with the human subject through architecture so as to augment their constant, active construction of place. But to do so is always dangerous as the fetishization and propagation of what has been is always so very close to limiting the possibilities of what will be. The architect must listen to the past notions of place and use these as the foundations of ever new constructions. As Wellmer puts it: “It is not only people who dream: cities and landscapes and even materials dream, and perhaps it is the task of architects to interpret these dreams and translate them into built space.”[5] Wellmer pleads that architects “have the courage to intervene instead of merely preserving, the courage to pursue the ‘project of modernity’ instead of resorting to the mere gestures of defence, of conservation, of regression.”[6] Only in this way is it possible to have a regional architecture that resists exclusion.

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[1] Pallasmaa, ‘Aesthetic and Existential Space’, 1.

[2] Norberg-Schultz, Architecture, 11.

[3] Norberg-Schultz, Architecture, 221.

[4] Wellmer, ‘Architecture and Territory’, 287.

[5] ibid

[6] ibid